seemed a most effective way, but not one was to
be found when the net came to shore. They
had all dived below the bottom of the pond.
There are land tortoises, and terrassius and
turtles. Sir Emerson once rode past a Tityrus in
charge of some sheep, who rested under the
shade of a turtle shell raised upon sticks.

Ceylon snakes are shy. One may ride
five hundred miles through jungle without
having seen one. Only two, the tic polonga
and the cobra de capello, inflict wounds fatal to
man; of the others, the majority are harmless.
The snake charmers who play with the
cobra, do not extract its fangs, but rely on their
own dexterity and the natural timidity of the
snake, which is always reluctant to employ its
fatal weapons. Only when accidentally trodden
upon in the night, or otherwise driven to self-
defence, will the cobra bite. The Singhalese,
when travelling in the dark, carry a stick with
a loose ring, and the noise made by it in striking
on the ground suffices to warn snakes out of the
path. There is a black polished stone, exceedingly
light, which is used as a snake-stone, and
supposed to have the power of drawing venom
of snakes from a recent wound. Placed over
the bite, it adheres to it for a few minutes, and
by its spongy nature appears to absorb some of
the blood. The stone is artificially prepared,
the mode of preparation being secret. Mr.
Faraday has examined one and finds it to be
charred bone, filled perhaps more than once with
blood, and, after each time of using, carefully
charred again.

A strange variety of fishes occupy the waters
of Ceylon. Six hundred different kinds have
been found near Colombo only; there are not
two hundred and fifty in all British waters.
Sharks are taken for the sake of their oil. There
are flaming many-coloured fishes, that obtain for
themselves such glittering names as the fire-fish
or the flower parrot.

Among the fresh-water fishes, which abound
so much that every little plash of water, though
but ankle deep, has fish in it, we find some of
the chief marvels of life upon the island.
Reservoirs and tanks are twice a year evaporated
to such dryness that the mud of their bottoms
becomes dust, and the clay gapes into hard
clefts. Rain comes with the change of the
monsoon, and in a few days natives are fishing in these
tanks—not for small fry, but full-grown fishes.
This is so unaccountable, that men have even
supposed such fish to have rained from the clouds.
Very small fishes, perhaps, have sometimes been
carried up and dropped again out of the clouds.
Again it is taught by Mr. Yarrell that these
fishes reappear by reason of the preservation of
unhatched spawn. But, not to mention other
difficulties, this theory would not account for
the appearance of a pond full of full-grown
fishes in a day or two after the fall of rain. The
truth is, that in Ceylon, and elsewhere, certain
fishes have the power of journeying overland in
search of water, or, when water fails, of burying
themselves, and becoming torpid until its
return. Both of these habits of certain Indian
fishes were learnt by the Greeks accompanying
Alexander, and are recorded in the works of
Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus. The
Romans ridiculed the notion. "Now," said Seneca,
when quoting Theophrastus, "we must go to
fish with a hatchet instead of a hook."
Nevertheless, here is a true fact. The doras of
Guiana have been seen travelling over land
during the dry season, in such numbers that the
negroes have filled baskets with them.
Sallegoix, in his account of Siam, names three
species of fish which traverse the damp grass,
and Sir John Bowring, when ascending and
descending the river to Bankok, was amused with
the new sight of fish leaving the river, gliding over
its wet banks, and disappearing in the jungle.
All these fishes are of a kind with heads so
constructed, that they carry with them moisture
enough to keep their gills damp. In Ceylon,
the chief traveller of this sort is a kind of perch
six inches long. It generally travels by night
through the dew, "but in its distress it is
sometimes compelled to travel by day ; and Mr. E. L.
Layard on one occasion encountered a number
of them travelling along a hot and dusty gravel
road under the mid-day sun." Mr. Morris,
government agent of Trincomalee, tells how, on
the drying up of tanks, the fish crowd into the
little pools, and roll by thousands in the gruely
mud. The same witness has seen them crawling
by hundreds from the pools as they go on drying,
and working over half a mile of hard soil,
indented by the foot prints of cattle, many of them
falling into cracks, where they become the prey
of kites and crows. The perch before mentioned
has even earned, on the Coromandel coast, the
name of climbing perch, because it has been seen
working its way up the stems of palm-trees.
Probably, any such feat was attempted only
by an accident. The fish can have nothing
to look for in a tree, and once up would not be
able to climb clown again. No tree climbing by
fishes has been seen in Ceylon.

Burying fishes in Ceylon sink into the mud,
and wait the change of the monsoon. Natives
have been seen digging them out of stiff clay
with the spade. Excessive heat in the tropics
answers to the excess of cold elsewhere, in checking
vegetation and compelling many animals to
hide themselves, and sleep away the barren
time.

We may sum up the animal wealth of this paradise,
with a word for the myriads of blood-sucking
land-leeches, that fasten upon the legs of travellers.
Butterflies come in dense flights, miles broad,
that will occupy hours or even days in passing
overhead; whence coming no one knows, and
whither going none can tell. There are the golden
beetles with their jewelled coats, and there are
the walking leaves ribbed, shaped, and coloured
like fallen leaves, that lay eggs not to be
distinguished by the eye from brown, five angled seeds,
with bits of stem attached to them. There are
the stick insects, which resemble jointed sticks.
The soothsayer, much given to an attitude of
prayer, is a murderer and a cannibal among his
own kind. The white ants, or termites (they are